How A Woman Mistook Herself For DEAD And Threw Tantrums About Her “Afterlife”
Cotard’s syndrome: When being dead is the reality instead of living and breathing.
In 2008, a 53-year-old immigrant Filipino woman was admitted to the psychiatric ward of a hospital in the US.
Her family had called 911 as the patient was hysterical, complaining that
“she was dead, smelled like rotting flesh, and wanted to be taken to a morgue so that she could be with dead people”.
Psychiatrists dub this as Cotard's syndrome, a rare psychiatric disorder
in which a person suffers from nihilistic delusions about being dead or losing his/her soul, organs, blood, or body parts. It was first discovered by Dr. Jules Cotard in 1882.
Did you know that deeper medical problems like Dementia can cause Cotard's Syndrome?